8 ms·

I'm no "sovereign citizen", and occasionally enjoy compilations on youtube of them getting owned in front of a judge (makes for a good laugh). I do however fin

by zionic 4y ago

I'm no "sovereign citizen", and occasionally enjoy compilations on youtube of them getting owned in front of a judge (makes for a good laugh). I do however find some sympathy with _one_ of their arguments, where they argue they never consented to be governed. I mean when I think about it, I was born into an established system that imposed its rules on me from birth. I had no say in accepting/rejecting the rules. I'm essentially property of the state, subject to its whims with little to no hope of changing them. So I get where some people come from with a "naw fuck that" attitude, even if I see such resistance as futile. Not directly sov-citizen related, but that does intersect with a broader community of people upset over how property works in the US. Namely, you don't own a damn thing. All deeds/titles are fee-simple, in that you merely buy and sell the right to rent that land from the government for as long as you can afford it. "Renters" in the colloquial sense are really renting twice, which is why "owning" is better. True ownership of property however no longer exists in the US. Maybe we can experiment with better society designs on mars, where landowners are truly sovereign and the state only owns the commons. Enforcement then only exists in the commons (and optionally on property with the consent of the owner).

tarboreus 4y ago
I think if you don't think we'll have the same thing on Mars as we do on Earth, then I have some NFTs to sell you.
- robonerd 4y ago
  (I'm skeptical of the very premise of colonizing Mars, but putting that aside..) I expect what forms on Mars, at least initially, will resemble the high seas a lot more than it does any country. You'll have facilities owned and commanded by corporations operating under flags of convenience, more or less free to engage in any nastiness they like (at least until a navy or coastguard with guns shows up to enforce their will on the facility.)
  - tarboreus 4y ago
    Perhaps, though that seems like an unstable equilibrium. By the time we have communities up there, they're have their powerful and their not powerful, just like we terrestrials.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  At this point, I’m convinced Mars is going to be some sort of neo-feudal territory.
DerpyBaby123 4y ago
Plato's Crito[1] deals directly with this question, after Socrates has been found guilty and sentenced to death for 'Corrupting the youth', his friends offer to help him leave the city rather than die. To paraphrase, Socrates says "Though not explicitly, I have by my actions agreed to be ruled by the laws of Athens by carrying out my life here and not choosing to move away to somewhere with a different set of laws" [1]http://www.columbia.edu/itc/lithum/wong/textclip.html http://www.columbia.edu/itc/lithum/wong/textclip.html @ [52b] I believe Plato will say they consented to be governed by this state, not at birth, but throughout their life by choosing to stay in a place that is governed by this state and enjoying the benefits.
- adolph 4y ago
  "a place that is governed by this state" In your belief, from what comes Plato's link between place and state? Places exist before states and often afterward. Can a state exist without place? If a place can exist without any particular state, can a person have a link to a place independent of a state?
  - DerpyBaby123 4y ago
    I do not know enough to answer about that question, nor to say if Plato even makes that link honestly. I think you're arguing with my summary. Imagine if I'd edited it to read: 'choosing to stay within the bounds of the government, and enjoying the benefits' Sovereign citizens do enjoy the benefits of the US state, do not reject them nor make strides at moving away from them (from anything I've read).
- somenameforme 4y ago
  I think that's somewhat different because in Ancient Greece there was extreme decentralization. Cities were sovereign entities with an extreme diversity of ideological and other values. Compare Athens and Sparta, for instance. And so in this system, if one stays in a city then there is a strong argument to be made that they are implicitly supportive of the laws and rules of said area. In modern times this isn't really the case. There tend to be immense legal restrictions on movement, let alone living + working in different areas. And the differences that do exist between even nations within the same "sphere" tend to be relatively negligible compared to, again, the sort of monumental differences you'd see just between different Greek city-states like Athens/Sparta.
JTbane 4y ago
>I mean when I think about it, I was born into an established system that imposed its rules on me from birth. I had no say in accepting/rejecting the rules. I'm essentially property of the state, subject to its whims with little to no hope of changing them. Would you rather be born into a state of anarchy? I think Hobbes addressed this.
- adolph 4y ago
  As a counterargument to Hobbes here is an excerpt from "The Dawn of Everything" in which Graeber and Wengrow argue that Hobbes' assertion isn't based in evidence. https://lithub.com/the-dawn-of-everything-is-not-a-book-about-the-origins-of-inequality/ https://lithub.com/the-dawn-of-everything-is-not-a-book-abou...
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Most of the anthropological evidence sides with Hobbes. The rates of violence in hunter gatherer societies is massive, with 10-15% of people dying at the hands of other humans. For the 20th century, despite two world wars, this figure was about 2%
    - tnjm 4y ago
      The evidence is very sparse, and what we do have suggests that modern hunter-gatherer societies are, on average, no more violent than humanity in general. (My personal if limited observation, having lived briefly with several, is that they seem to be notably less violent than the -- often frontier -- communities around them.) Steven Pinker has muddied the water with quite a lot of nonsense in The Better Angels of our Nature. An interesting, better-sourced and less cherry-picked read is a 2013 paper in Science[0]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1235675 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1235675
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        The evidence is not sparse, it comes from a diverse set of sources from observation of existing hunter-gatheter communities across different continents as well as archaeological evidence. It's true that violence is much lower in absolute numbers. But by virtue of drastically lower overall populations, the proportional rate is much higher. 5 people killed our of a kin-group of 100 people is like 15 million people killed in the USA. There is an appeal to the thought that humans in a natural state are peaceful. Because if modern society has made mankind violent, then we can hopefully roll back it's influence and restore us to that peaceful state. But that's not what our evidence suggests. This article examines existing hunter gatherers: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2007/12/19/noble-or-savage https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2007/12/19/nobl... For a book that dives into the archaeological evidence, see War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat.
leephillips 4y ago
I’m not impressed. It just reminds me of children who, when they reach a certain age, start whining, “Well I didn’t ask to be born.”
- robonerd 4y ago
  We tell these people about "social contracts" then smirk when they raise the common sense objection of never signing such a contract in the first place. Of course a social contract is not at all the same as a real contract, a social contract is not a document that you sign, it applies to you whether or not you ever consented to it. But when language that seems to conflate the two is used to persuade people who don't really have a firm grasp on the way the world works, it seems cruel to laugh at their confusion.
_jal 4y ago
> where they argue they never consented to be governed They also never consented to birth. They are free to renounce their citizenship, however. Nobody is forcing them to stay US citizens. > Maybe we can experiment with better society designs on mars Hate to break it to you, but Mars colonies (assuming they ever exist) are going to be dictatorships. Lifeboat ethics don't leave a lot of room for arguing, let alone voting.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  The book Decline and Rise of Democracy goes into detail about this. Pretty much all nations that had a resource jugular (I.e. Egypt with the Nile) become extractive societies.
- kaybe 4y ago
  Is it really that easy for US citizens to leave? Where can you go if you have neither money nor education or skills and are older?
  - fencepost 4y ago
    You can leave most countries and renounce citizenship, typically with some hoops to jump through but it can be done. The questions of where you'll go and how you'll support yourself are something that you'd best figure out before starting that process, because after you start your country of origin may well say 'not OUR problem anymore' about you.
  - tempestn 4y ago
    That's not really the US's fault though, right? "You're free to leave, but if you want to stay here you have to abide by our rules," sounds reasonable I think. There are countries in the world where you're not free to leave even if another country will take you, and this argument would hold a lot more water.
- t-3 4y ago
  Renunciation is not free - they literally charge you for it. You also can't renounce without obtaining another citizenship, which, surprise, surprise, you generally have to buy with both time and money.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
And they're right. They never (formally, explicitly) consented to the rules. But therefore... what? They have three options. One, they can choose to live and operate under those rules. Two, they can work within the system to change the rules. Or three, they can go somewhere that has rules more to their liking. This isn't a prison; they can leave any time they choose. One could even argue that by staying in the country, they are (informally, implicitly) consenting to be governed by its rules. But instead, they try a fourth alternative: Stay, but pretend that the rules don't apply to them because of laughably bogus legal theories. That doesn't work, no matter how many new legal theories they try, and no matter how much bogus logic and philosophizing they throw at it. We've got a lot of non-sov-cit people who don't consent to the rules. We call them "criminals".
- necovek 4y ago
  While your three options are the three practical options, one should note that it's not trivial to move to whatever country you might want, and not just because of costs. Getting a work permit in another country is usually pretty hard, for instance. Still, even with that, I think we (as a society/civilisation) need people like that, challenging the system in all sorts of ways. And not everyone not obeying the rules is a "criminal" — none of the civil offenses qualify, for instance, even in the legal sense. Of course, some of those "challenges", especially most of those criminal ones, should be dealt with proper "retaliation" (prison sentences, large penalties...) from the society so it's obvious which "challenges" are not welcome. But let's not forget that many of the things we take for granted today have been criminal in the not so distant past.
  - vkou 4y ago
    > While your three options are the three practical options, one should note that it's not trivial to move to whatever country you might want, and not just because of costs. It's also not trivial (Next to impossible, actually) to survive alone, completely independent of society. If you want the benefits of society, you have to abide by its rules.
    - 4y ago
c22 4y ago
That's the thing, they're not really wrong, they just lack the army to back up their claims. I do think people should be allowed to sue their parents for wrongful birth, though.
- caffeine 4y ago
  I think parents should be allowed to hit their kids for being ungrateful little runts.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - orestarod 4y ago
    Moreover, parents should own their kids since they gave birth to them. They should be legally be able to take every decision for them, and be their guardian, until they die. They gave their children birth after all.
- kbelder 4y ago
  >sue their parents for wrongful birth Nah, not when there's an obvious and simple remedy.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    If it was simple, people would be doing it left and right. More like 'they got me hooked on heroine'.
gwright 4y ago
I've wondered at times if it would make sense for there to be an explicit legal proceeding at the age of majority in which you explicitly opt in to the social contract analogous to the naturalization process when a foreigner becomes a citizen. I get hung up on what happens if you choose not to opt-in.
- landemva 4y ago
  You would still be subject to not harming others nor break a voluntary agreement/contract. People have rights, and may defend themselves.
landemva 4y ago
>> you merely buy and sell the right to rent that land from the government for as long as you can afford it. You seem to be speaking of property tax on land. Did you know not all land is on county assesor tax roles? Have you researched how to find land not in the county tax catalog?
- zionic 4y ago
  I’m not aware of any land/states with no property tax. Have a link?

by zionic 4y ago

tarboreus 4y ago

I think if you don't think we'll have the same thing on Mars as we do on Earth, then I have some NFTs to sell you.

robonerd 4y ago
(I'm skeptical of the very premise of colonizing Mars, but putting that aside..) I expect what forms on Mars, at least initially, will resemble the high seas a lot more than it does any country. You'll have facilities owned and commanded by corporations operating under flags of convenience, more or less free to engage in any nastiness they like (at least until a navy or coastguard with guns shows up to enforce their will on the facility.)
- tarboreus 4y ago
  Perhaps, though that seems like an unstable equilibrium. By the time we have communities up there, they're have their powerful and their not powerful, just like we terrestrials.
the_only_law 4y ago
At this point, I’m convinced Mars is going to be some sort of neo-feudal territory.

DerpyBaby123 4y ago

Plato's Crito[1] deals directly with this question, after Socrates has been found guilty and sentenced to death for 'Corrupting the youth', his friends offer to help him leave the city rather than die. To paraphrase, Socrates says "Though not explicitly, I have by my actions agreed to be ruled by the laws of Athens by carrying out my life here and not choosing to move away to somewhere with a different set of laws" [1]http://www.columbia.edu/itc/lithum/wong/textclip.html http://www.columbia.edu/itc/lithum/wong/textclip.html @ [52b] I believe Plato will say they consented to be governed by this state, not at birth, but throughout their life by choosing to stay in a place that is governed by this state and enjoying the benefits.

adolph 4y ago
"a place that is governed by this state" In your belief, from what comes Plato's link between place and state? Places exist before states and often afterward. Can a state exist without place? If a place can exist without any particular state, can a person have a link to a place independent of a state?
- DerpyBaby123 4y ago
  I do not know enough to answer about that question, nor to say if Plato even makes that link honestly. I think you're arguing with my summary. Imagine if I'd edited it to read: 'choosing to stay within the bounds of the government, and enjoying the benefits' Sovereign citizens do enjoy the benefits of the US state, do not reject them nor make strides at moving away from them (from anything I've read).
somenameforme 4y ago
I think that's somewhat different because in Ancient Greece there was extreme decentralization. Cities were sovereign entities with an extreme diversity of ideological and other values. Compare Athens and Sparta, for instance. And so in this system, if one stays in a city then there is a strong argument to be made that they are implicitly supportive of the laws and rules of said area. In modern times this isn't really the case. There tend to be immense legal restrictions on movement, let alone living + working in different areas. And the differences that do exist between even nations within the same "sphere" tend to be relatively negligible compared to, again, the sort of monumental differences you'd see just between different Greek city-states like Athens/Sparta.

JTbane 4y ago

>I mean when I think about it, I was born into an established system that imposed its rules on me from birth. I had no say in accepting/rejecting the rules. I'm essentially property of the state, subject to its whims with little to no hope of changing them. Would you rather be born into a state of anarchy? I think Hobbes addressed this.

adolph 4y ago
As a counterargument to Hobbes here is an excerpt from "The Dawn of Everything" in which Graeber and Wengrow argue that Hobbes' assertion isn't based in evidence. https://lithub.com/the-dawn-of-everything-is-not-a-book-about-the-origins-of-inequality/ https://lithub.com/the-dawn-of-everything-is-not-a-book-abou...
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Most of the anthropological evidence sides with Hobbes. The rates of violence in hunter gatherer societies is massive, with 10-15% of people dying at the hands of other humans. For the 20th century, despite two world wars, this figure was about 2%
  - tnjm 4y ago
    The evidence is very sparse, and what we do have suggests that modern hunter-gatherer societies are, on average, no more violent than humanity in general. (My personal if limited observation, having lived briefly with several, is that they seem to be notably less violent than the -- often frontier -- communities around them.) Steven Pinker has muddied the water with quite a lot of nonsense in The Better Angels of our Nature. An interesting, better-sourced and less cherry-picked read is a 2013 paper in Science[0]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1235675 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1235675
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      The evidence is not sparse, it comes from a diverse set of sources from observation of existing hunter-gatheter communities across different continents as well as archaeological evidence. It's true that violence is much lower in absolute numbers. But by virtue of drastically lower overall populations, the proportional rate is much higher. 5 people killed our of a kin-group of 100 people is like 15 million people killed in the USA. There is an appeal to the thought that humans in a natural state are peaceful. Because if modern society has made mankind violent, then we can hopefully roll back it's influence and restore us to that peaceful state. But that's not what our evidence suggests. This article examines existing hunter gatherers: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2007/12/19/noble-or-savage https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2007/12/19/nobl... For a book that dives into the archaeological evidence, see War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat.

leephillips 4y ago

I’m not impressed. It just reminds me of children who, when they reach a certain age, start whining, “Well I didn’t ask to be born.”

robonerd 4y ago
We tell these people about "social contracts" then smirk when they raise the common sense objection of never signing such a contract in the first place. Of course a social contract is not at all the same as a real contract, a social contract is not a document that you sign, it applies to you whether or not you ever consented to it. But when language that seems to conflate the two is used to persuade people who don't really have a firm grasp on the way the world works, it seems cruel to laugh at their confusion.

_jal 4y ago

> where they argue they never consented to be governed They also never consented to birth. They are free to renounce their citizenship, however. Nobody is forcing them to stay US citizens. > Maybe we can experiment with better society designs on mars Hate to break it to you, but Mars colonies (assuming they ever exist) are going to be dictatorships. Lifeboat ethics don't leave a lot of room for arguing, let alone voting.

edgyquant 4y ago
The book Decline and Rise of Democracy goes into detail about this. Pretty much all nations that had a resource jugular (I.e. Egypt with the Nile) become extractive societies.
kaybe 4y ago
Is it really that easy for US citizens to leave? Where can you go if you have neither money nor education or skills and are older?
- fencepost 4y ago
  You can leave most countries and renounce citizenship, typically with some hoops to jump through but it can be done. The questions of where you'll go and how you'll support yourself are something that you'd best figure out before starting that process, because after you start your country of origin may well say 'not OUR problem anymore' about you.
- tempestn 4y ago
  That's not really the US's fault though, right? "You're free to leave, but if you want to stay here you have to abide by our rules," sounds reasonable I think. There are countries in the world where you're not free to leave even if another country will take you, and this argument would hold a lot more water.
t-3 4y ago
Renunciation is not free - they literally charge you for it. You also can't renounce without obtaining another citizenship, which, surprise, surprise, you generally have to buy with both time and money.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

And they're right. They never (formally, explicitly) consented to the rules. But therefore... what? They have three options. One, they can choose to live and operate under those rules. Two, they can work within the system to change the rules. Or three, they can go somewhere that has rules more to their liking. This isn't a prison; they can leave any time they choose. One could even argue that by staying in the country, they are (informally, implicitly) consenting to be governed by its rules. But instead, they try a fourth alternative: Stay, but pretend that the rules don't apply to them because of laughably bogus legal theories. That doesn't work, no matter how many new legal theories they try, and no matter how much bogus logic and philosophizing they throw at it. We've got a lot of non-sov-cit people who don't consent to the rules. We call them "criminals".

necovek 4y ago
While your three options are the three practical options, one should note that it's not trivial to move to whatever country you might want, and not just because of costs. Getting a work permit in another country is usually pretty hard, for instance. Still, even with that, I think we (as a society/civilisation) need people like that, challenging the system in all sorts of ways. And not everyone not obeying the rules is a "criminal" — none of the civil offenses qualify, for instance, even in the legal sense. Of course, some of those "challenges", especially most of those criminal ones, should be dealt with proper "retaliation" (prison sentences, large penalties...) from the society so it's obvious which "challenges" are not welcome. But let's not forget that many of the things we take for granted today have been criminal in the not so distant past.
- vkou 4y ago
  > While your three options are the three practical options, one should note that it's not trivial to move to whatever country you might want, and not just because of costs. It's also not trivial (Next to impossible, actually) to survive alone, completely independent of society. If you want the benefits of society, you have to abide by its rules.
  - 4y ago

c22 4y ago

That's the thing, they're not really wrong, they just lack the army to back up their claims. I do think people should be allowed to sue their parents for wrongful birth, though.

caffeine 4y ago
I think parents should be allowed to hit their kids for being ungrateful little runts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- orestarod 4y ago
  Moreover, parents should own their kids since they gave birth to them. They should be legally be able to take every decision for them, and be their guardian, until they die. They gave their children birth after all.
kbelder 4y ago
>sue their parents for wrongful birth Nah, not when there's an obvious and simple remedy.
- eternalban 4y ago
  If it was simple, people would be doing it left and right. More like 'they got me hooked on heroine'.

gwright 4y ago

I've wondered at times if it would make sense for there to be an explicit legal proceeding at the age of majority in which you explicitly opt in to the social contract analogous to the naturalization process when a foreigner becomes a citizen. I get hung up on what happens if you choose not to opt-in.

landemva 4y ago
You would still be subject to not harming others nor break a voluntary agreement/contract. People have rights, and may defend themselves.

landemva 4y ago

>> you merely buy and sell the right to rent that land from the government for as long as you can afford it. You seem to be speaking of property tax on land. Did you know not all land is on county assesor tax roles? Have you researched how to find land not in the county tax catalog?

zionic 4y ago
I’m not aware of any land/states with no property tax. Have a link?